Their Generation

David Hollinger

At a time when politicians are openly attacking the study of history, “Their Generation” goes back to the scholars who fundamentally transformed the field after the 1960s and, in doing so, changed how Americans understand themselves. These historians shattered narrow canons, introduced ignored voices to the center of the story, and confronted myths of a national history devoid of conflict and struggle. This ongoing series, available exclusively to paid subscribers of The Long View in my Friday newsletter, lets them speak for themselves, at a moment when historical truth is once again under threat.

David Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the intellectual and ethno-racial history of the United States since the Civil War and also focuses on intellectual movements of the United States interpreted in the context of the larger intellectual history of the North Atlantic West. His books and articles included studies of pragmatism, modernism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Some of his books include Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism; Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History; Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America; When This Mask of Flesh is Broken: The Story of an American Protestant Family, and Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Become More Conservative and Society More Secular. His source book, The American Intellectual Tradition, is amongst the most widely used textbooks in college undergraduate courses focusing on American intellectual history since the Civil War. He was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 2001-02. Hollinger served as President of the Organization of American Historians in 2010-2011.

For more on the work of David Hollinger, see https://history.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/emeriti/david-hollinger

My Interview with David Hollinger

1) How did your activism in the 1960s and 1970s shape the way you came to study and interpret American history?

I participated in the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and in a variety of anti-war activities at Berkeley and then at SUNY Buffalo where I was a precinct captain for McGovern. I was never a leader in any of these political endeavors, but they left a mark on me. Yes, I was made more sensitive to racism and imperialism, as I think all of us were. In that respect, I am a standard-issue child of the 1960s. Race and imperialism were never my main subjects, but I engaged both several times in my career. Yet I tried to maintain more distance between political activism and scholarship than some of my contemporaries.

The connection, to be sure, was there from the start. When the Berkeley faculty voted overwhelmingly to support the Free Speech Movement on December 8, 1964, saving the honor of the University of California, I vowed to be always active in faculty governance, and have been. I wrote more about the history of universities and the ethics of scholarship than about labor unions or civil rights organizations and their theoretical justifications, but not because I disagreed with my contemporaries about the importance of these more 60s-associated topics. I simply was more inspired by the value of knowledge-centered institutions devoted to the discovery and dissemination of truth.

The professors that I studied with persuaded me by example and by their teaching that truth could challenge the manifest evils of our society. We could contend against the patently false historical narratives that were routinely deployed to defend injustices, domestic and global. Who do I have in mind? Win Jordan, Larry Levine, Ken Stampp, and Leon Litwack, among others. Serving as Jordan’s research assistant on WHITE OVER BLACK was formative for me. Although this monumental volume of 1968 is often remembered as a “60s book,” it was conceived in the late 1950s by a patrician scholar with Republican sympathies who was decidedly diffident about politics. Politically, the most important figure for me was Reggie Zelnik, a specialist in modern Russia whom I got to know during the Free Speech Movement and who was then my political mentor for the rest of my time at Berkeley. Reggie and I were together in countless anti-war events. But he was very strict with himself, professionally, and he resoundingly affirmed classical academic values. I detail this in my contribution to Reginald E. Zelnik, PERILS OF PANKRATOVA (Seattle, 2005), a collection of appreciations for Zelnik published along with some of his articles shortly after his death. But while Reggie’s enduring commitment to academia was important to me, so was having friends who left academia to become full-time political activists. Those of us in my generation who stayed in academia had to really believe in it, because friends we cared about, and who cared about us, told us that academia was a sterile misuse of our energies.

Important, too, was my friendship with Gabriel Kolko during my first year at Buffalo, 1969-70. I worked with Gabriel as a team organizing faculty for anti-war activities. I was struck with how critical he was of many of our colleagues for mushing everything together, treating every radical student as anointed, allowing themselves to be led around by sloganeering youth trying to outdo each other in high-pitched vehemence. Gabriel made clear that he respected the political experience that I and other of Buffalo’s many Berkeley Ph.D’s brought to events at Buffalo, marking us as a group of Assistant Professors somewhat more reserved than the Harvard and Princeton Ph.D.’s. Gabriel was especially eloquent on the need to clarify just what was to be accomplished by a given action. This may sound banal, but it wasn’t in many of the conversations on the Left in those days. “You chose one side or another,” it was often asserted with an air of deep savvy. I vividly remember being told by a Buffalo undergraduate that smashing the windows of grocery stores on Main Street was a valid anti-war activity, because business as usual in grocery stores was a way of supporting the Vietnam War. I remember going from one unit of the campus to another with Gabriel to argue for a senate resolution about the war, and he would say, before we entered a biology lab, for example, “Now this is a different constituency,” and we’d develop a slightly different line than we had just used with literature professors. Gaby was also a devoted scholar and was always good for a vigorous discussion of what was wrong or right about the latest article or book. He found a lot wrong with American universities, but I’ve always remembered his appreciation for the more traditionally academic demeanor that was such an important part of me. Kolko was the toughest anti-war activist and the most calculating political operative I ever worked with, and he never made me doubt that writing good history really mattered. He left Buffalo the next year, but his impact on me was long-lasting.

2) How did religion influence your intellectual development?

I was an atheist by the time I was absorbed into the Berkeley community in 1963. But I was never hostile to the ecumenical Protestantism of my upbringing, and I was always conscious of being the direct lineal descendant of a line of Anabaptist preachers going back to mid-Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania. And as a registered conscientious objector, it was easy for me to become involved in the anti-war movement. My undergraduate college, La Verne, was affiliated with my ancestral denomination, the Church of the Brethen, but La Verne’s basic courses in philosophy, sociology, history, and literature moved me away from commitment to Christianity of any kind. This religious background became important at mid-career, when I’d become aware that I had a feel for the history of American Protestantism that few other secular scholars had. I thought I had things to say that others were not saying, either out of bias, indifference, or honest ignorance.